Tagged Netstrings (tnetstrings) was a related proposal from 15 years ago or so. It replaces the comma with a single-character type definition so you can do JSON-like objects with a couple of recursive types: you had ',', '#', '^', '!', and '~' for strings, integers, floats, booleans, and nulls, then ']' and '}' for lists and dictionaries.
BitTorrent's bencoding format, used in .torrent files, effectively uses netstrings-- but without the trailing commas, so it uses "5:hello" to represent filenames and similar.
Tagged Netstrings (tnetstrings) was a related proposal from 15 years ago or so. It replaces the comma with a single-character type definition so you can do JSON-like objects with a couple of recursive types: you had ',', '#', '^', '!', and '~' for strings, integers, floats, booleans, and nulls, then ']' and '}' for lists and dictionaries.
Most of the links have bitrotted and I don't think it ever got much traction, but I did always like how simple it was. There's a copy someone grabbed of the original spec here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ged/tnetstrings.info/refs/...
Here's a HTML viewer (not mine; use it at your own risk): <https://html-preview.github.io/?url=https://raw.githubuserco...>
Seems like a coherent, sensible proposal, as one might expect from djb. Any notable protocols use them?
BitTorrent's bencoding format, used in .torrent files, effectively uses netstrings-- but without the trailing commas, so it uses "5:hello" to represent filenames and similar.
Not sure if it counts as notable, but SCGI uses it too: https://python.ca/scgi/protocol.txt
Php serialized uses
For strings, which is pretty similar. Size is in bytes.(1997) -DJB